How my 1992 prom picture ended up on HBO’s John Oliver show

When John Oliver planted a giant bag of marijuana in my hand Sunday night and broadcast it to millions of HBO viewers, I immediately thought of Chekhov.

In one of the Russian master’s shortest short stories, a lowly civil servant is so ecstatic to find an article about himself in the newspaper that he cannot stop bragging to family and friends — even though the story relays how he was run over by a horse while crossing the street in a drunken stupor.

This is really all you need to know about fame and media in 2015. It’s also precisely how I felt when several eagle-eyed friends messaged me on Facebook that my 1992 Stuyvesant High School prom picture had somehow ended up in an Oliver segment about — what else? — lethal injections in Nebraska. (Like pretty much every journalist in the universe, I’m a huge fan of “Last Week Tonight,” but, given how early I have to wake up on Monday mornings, I usually watch it on demand later in the week.) So I was sure my friends were punking me.

There I was, a dorky, baby-faced 17-year-old kid with braces and an ill-fitting, ill-chosen white dinner jacket, with one arm draped awkwardly around my beautiful date and the other, thanks to HBO and the magic of Photoshop, toting a whole lot of weed. It was embarrassing. Horrifying. And hilarious. So naturally I shared it with everyone I know.

But there was one thing that didn’t make sense. My date, Toby Bochan, who remains one of my closest friends, put it simply on Facebook: “How did they get this photo. How?” Of all the prom pictures in all the towns in all the nation, why did John Oliver choose ours? (Oliver and HBO
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alas, did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for the show seemed equally baffled by the weirdness of the incident.)

Then I remembered that when I picked Toby up at her parents’ Upper West Side apartment, Nancy Moran, a photographer acquaintance who wanted to build out her portfolio, shot a bunch of pictures of us. At some point, though I never gave it another thought in the ensuing 23 years, she must have asked us to sign a release so she could sell them to an agency.

Absurdly, Toby and I had become that scourge of the Internet, that lame crutch for art in a pinch that’s relied upon by news sites everywhere: We were a stock photo.

As online news editors, Toby and I were both all too familiar with the world of stock photos — she formerly was a home-page editor for Yahoo
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, and is now the director of the creative newsroom at Storyful.

But even though we’d both used countless such images to illustrate everything from pieces on medical studies to regulatory battles over 401(k)s, and even though we’d wrestled with the ethical questions of connecting a “fake” person with an actual news event, until I saw myself used as a stand-in for a Nebraska high-school junior trying to “get into the pants” of his prom date with some chemical assistance, I had never considered the obvious: Stock-photo people are people, too.

Toby, who now licenses videos and photos for brands, agreed: “It’s one thing to give someone’s adorable child video to the ‘Today’ show for the world to coo and fawn over and another when I work with an agency to license that same baby video for use in an ad for Whirlpool,” she said.

One of Toby’s colleagues at Storyful did some sleuthing to find the original photo on Getty’s site. It was captioned “couple in formal attire.” Getty quoted us a price of $915 for the image, which was almost tempting, since I don’t actually have a copy.

Getty Images

The original photo is available on Getty — for $915.

The “model release” Toby and I signed entitled John Oliver to use and alter the image in pretty much any way he wanted. The bag of pot in my hand was hilarious, but what if it had been something far more nefarious, like an AR-15 assault rifle, a selfie stick or, still worse, an E.L. James novel? There have been many cases of people who sign such releases never imagining how their images might be used, such as the gay couple from New Jersey who ended up in a political attack ad or pretty much everyone snookered into appearing in the Borat movie.

Case law indicates that even if I did find the image defamatory, HBO wouldn’t have to tap the riches of Westeros to help pay off what remains of my journalism-school student loans.

If I have one regret, it is this: I always hoped that if I were to appear beside John Oliver, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, it would be to discuss the book I still need to get around to writing.

But no matter. As Mitya Kuldarov, the unfortunate hero of the Chekhov story, puts it, “Now all Russia knows of me! All Russia! Till now only you knew that there was a registration clerk called Dmitry Kuldarov, and now all Russia knows it! Mamma! Oh, Lord!”

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